brainwagon

As I was driving in this morning, I entertained a train of thought that led me back to thinking about peer to peer networks. I recalled that I had seen a posting by Ed Felton some years ago about implementing a peer-to-peer networking scheme in a very few lines of Python. A few minutes of [...]

Jared Newman of PC World thinks that Apple blew it with respect to the multitasking in the iPhone: Multitasking With iOS 4 is Horrible: Apple Blew It – PCWorld Here’s the funny thing though: all these industry pundits keep ranting about how features of the iPhone or iPad are really terrible, and yet when polled, [...]

32 bit processors now cost $1. That means that you can build fairly competent video games for the price of a coffee. Check it out: RBox: A diy 32 bit game console for the price of a latte – rossum’s posterous. Addendum: The prototype is actually built on a small board that can be ordered [...]

Near Space Balloon Flight, shot with HD HERO cameras from GoPro from Kevin Macko on Vimeo.

It’s good to see that 16 year old Abby Sunderland has been rescued by a French fishing vessel. She was attempting to set a world record by sailing around the world solo. A lot of people have been commenting about how reckless, negligent, etc.. her parents were for letting someone so young attempt such a [...]

Lots of amateur astronomers use Registax to do what is known as “Lucky Imaging”. The idea is that you record a bunch of video frames, and hope that you capture some moments of good seeing, which you then carefully align and average to remove noise, and then enhance. I was playing around with a sequence [...]

I am always on the lookout for people who build interesting computers from scratch. Here’s another nifty one: a 4 bit CPU called the Duo 128 Elite by Jack Eisenmann. It’s a pretty obscure little architecture, but is cool enough to play pong on a 8×8 LED display. DUO 128 Elite httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IxWSvlcP3c

As part of the “How To Make (Almost) Anything” course at MIT, David Carr designed and built a very simple 3 axis mill, that seems entirely adequate for milling PCBs and light materials. While it may not be the most precise, it’s very clever. Nifty $90 CNC Mill, by David Carr.

I’m back again fighting the battle against my weight, cholesterol and blood pressure. As a guy who tries to be very rational and very scientific, I’m constantly looking for (and constantly frustrated) by the lack of rigorous and useful scientific data that guides me in trying to change my behavior to have a better health [...]

Can someone (preferably somebody whose very keen on baseball, especially sabermetrics) answer me a question? Tonight I was at the game between the Athletics and Twins in Oakland. After trailing 1-3, the A’s score twice in the bottom of the eighth inning to tie the game up going into the ninth. Danny Valencia strikes out. [...]

Two different amateur astronomers detected an object impacting Jupiter on June 3.   Catch the video: it’s pretty impressive, and shows that amateurs can make interesting observations of our universe.    If you haven’t looked through a telescope lately (or a good one) this video shows the role that atmospheric conditions play.   As you watch carefully, fine [...]

I was listening to Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast as I was commuting this morning, and found that Steve Gibson said something which clarified how I feel about Facebook and Twitter. Lots of people are upset about Facebook privacy concerns. I’m not really among them. If I post something on Facebook, I [...]

Yesterday was an intereseting day in baseball. In the last month, we’ve seen two perfect games pitched: the first by Dallas Braden, and the second by Roy Halladay. For those of you who aren’t big baseball fans, those were only the 19th and 20th perfect games recorded in Major League Baseball history. The last time [...]

it seems like the last month has been rife with stories of corporations doing things that annoy and irritate their customers. Facebook privacy concerns. Google sniffing Wi-Fi. Apple rejecting apps for inscrutable reasons. Heck, BP not checking their blow-out preventer. Each of these have caused me a bit of annoyance: some perhaps more than they [...]